It is rare for a videogame to really capture something essential about the squishy center of what makes us human. Most videogames are more interested in using digital bullets to expose a pixelated rendering of that squishy center, rather than attempting to drive at our emotional core, but Unravel, published by Coldwood Interactive in February of 2016, is a stunning example of the exception to that rule.

Coldwood Interactive, the game’s creators, are based in Sweden, and they set their game very tangibly in their own space: signs are in Swedish and the “feel” of the game’s settings strikes this upper Midwesterner as very “Scandinavian.” I found this setting both honest and refreshing; so many games choose settings which are either generically “Western” (particularly fantasy games and space operas), unapologetically American, or cringe-worthily imperialist (such as Tomb Raider or Call of Duty).

Unravel is both beautiful and soulful, and is utterly unapologetic in its ideological argumentation for human connection to both one another and to our natural environment. The levels are lush, the early scenes set in forests or seasides and rich with plant and animal life. Later levels are equally detailed, but incorporate elements of human intervention and destruction: factories, a flooded quarry with nuclear waste, a junkyard. The narrative told with the settings alone is one of human interference which has changed the landscape from beautiful to toxic, a teleological descent into darkness which is both figurative and literal, and culminates in death.

But in addition to this narrative of environmental destruction is an entirely separate story of very human connection and loss. Unravel follows the adventures of a tiny yarn monster, known as Yarny, as he attempts to collect small yarn badges from the various levels of the game so that he can reattach them to the exterior cover of an empty photo album. Each level is accessed through a photograph somewhere in Yarny’s house, and the acquisition of each small yarn badge puts a memory and series of photographs into the album.

Yarny himself is the epitome of adorable—a tiny, red yarn creature with white eyes and tiny hands and feet (he’s so cute, there’s a “How to Make Your Own Yarny Guide,” and yes, I want one). He uses his own yarn to navigate obstacles, climbing up his “yarn tail,” tying it off to create bridges, or casting it to swing from attachment points throughout the levels. From time to time, his yarn “runs out,” and he has to recast his body from small caches of yarn distributed at appropriate points along the levels.

As the player moves through the game, it becomes clear that Yarny is reconstructing the memories of the mistress of the house, not simply in the collection of yarn badges and photographs, but in the ghostly apparitions of children and adults which appear throughout the levels. These brief moments tell the story of family vacations, weekend excursions, and summers spent on the ocean or camping in the woods. As such, they are the kind of magical, fairy-tale memories that appear universal, but don’t touch on most of the everyday parts of life—the arguments, the hurt feelings, the day to day drudgery.

But as Yarny’s journey continues, the images change. First, there is the introduction of train tracks, an invasion into the natural world by human invention and innovation—the beginning of adulthood for the children who now appear older, taller, more interested in one another than they are in their parents or the fantasy of their childhood. Fences are climbed, and Yarny begins to face difficulties which present more danger than before—birds which threaten to carry him off and a very persistent rodent who has to be lured away before he can proceed.

And then the adult world becomes rapidly, painfully apparent. One of the children, now grown, is arrested protesting the destruction of nature by a mining company whose use of toxic chemicals poisons the earth (and will kill Yarny, if he falls into it). Industry takes the place of forests and grasses, and Yarny now has to navigate conveyer belts, rusting machinery, and a car-repair shop, where the father—his hair greying—once worked on a deteriorating engine.

Spoilers Below

The world Yarny now traverses is more dangerous than idyllic, and the music is bittersweet rather than bucolic. By this point, it was clear to me that this game was not going to have a happy ending in the Disney sense; as the levels progressively become darker and more tarnished, the daylight in the house (the hub) dims, and the people age, a trajectory that cannot end any way but in death. At the end of the last industrial level, he finds only half a yarn badge—half a heart, torn in two by, it turns out, the death of the father and husband of the woman whose memories we are rebuilding.

The final level is cold and dark, and begins with the slow swinging open of a wrought-iron fence. It’s different from the previous levels, as Yarny is tied—literally—to a lantern and must remain so or be blown away by the winter wind. The lanterns are grave-markers, lit to commemorate the dead on All Saint’s/All Soul’s Day in Sweden (and other countries). Yarny must drag his lantern through the wind and snow until he is able to reach the end—and find the other half of the torn patch. Once he finds, it, he is lifted by human hands—live hands, which we have not seen until now—and taken home.

The game’s ending reminds us of two things: first, that death is an inevitable part of life, to be mourned but not to overshadow the lives of the still-living; second, that life continues—at the game’s conclusion, the woman—presumably Yarny’s creator—leaves the kitchen with her granddaughter, starting another generation of memories like those in Yarny’s now-full album.

As such, Unravel itself is a bittersweet game, a reminder both of the persistence of life and of the inevitability of death. It contains both a warning against the exploitation of our natural environment and a caution to preserve both our memories and the natural world—for ourselves, but also for the generations to come. Yet, at the same time that Unravel looks forward, it also looks back, celebrating the richness of memory and the beauty of those who have lived before us, reminding us, as we hurtle forward into a digital future, of the importance of the analog and of the stories which make us who we are.

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When people started talking about Pokemon Go I was extremely skeptical. It sounded a little like Ingress and a little like Neko Atsume, and I never really “got” Pokemon the way people 5-10 years younger than me always did. I never watched the cartoons, I never played the card game, I never owned a handheld gaming device (until a smartphone), so I just never “got” Pokemon. I have to admit, I still don’t “get” the other games.

But I get Pokemon Go. Not because I care particularly about the “battle” aspect of the game (which is where the origin of the cards comes in), but because of the way it’s utterly transforming the way we’re interacting with each other. Yesterday, I went out for a Poke-walk (yes, that’s now a term) with my husband, just to try this crazy thing out. And I get it. I get why there are thousands of people in Central Park all playing PG.

There are also a lot of people sharing hilarious AR overlay photos of the Pokemon they’re catching… in bathrooms, in Subway on the sandwich fixin’s, on cars, next to their cats and dogs… on their laptop while looking at TLF…

We live in an historic district, so, lucky for us, there are Pokestops pretty much all over our neighborhood. Pokestops, for those of you yet to jump on the Poke-train, are geo-tagged spots that give you resources and items (Pokeballs, which catch the Pokemon; eggs which hatch Pokemon; incubators for the eggs; revive crystals for when your Pokemon are knocked unconscious in battle; potions to restore health; etc.). A quick 10-minute jaunt around the neighborhood thus has a high-yield of in-game items. We’re also pretty close to a couple major monuments, and those have Gyms (battle arenas in which Pokemon can fight each other). We’re also within pretty easy walking distance of a museum with a garden open to the public for free, and it’s a veritable PG haven. Yesterday there were easily a dozen people playing PG at any given time in that garden.

The two best parts about the game, however, have absolutely nothing to do with its mechanics, despite being caused by them.

First, it’s getting people out walking. It’s a geocaching game (made by the people who made Ingress and using the same portals, if you’re familiar with that), so in order to do a lot of things in it, you have to get out and walk (or run–we saw a jogger stopping at all the Pokestops along the street). In order to incubate eggs, you have to walk a certain distance (and it uses step-tracking, not just location, so driving around in an effort to hatch Pokemon will not work). People who are seriously into playing are getting a LOT of exercise. We talked to a lovely player yesterday who had already logged over 15,000 steps. I did laps of a reflecting pool just to hatch a Squirtle, and I barely even know what a Squirtle is or why I care so much about hatching it.

In that sense, PG is a reaction against the so-termed “obesity epidemic,” but, more than that (because I’m not into fat-shaming and I don’t particularly care what weight people are so long as they’re happy and healthy), it’s a reaction against a kind of workaholic culture that traps people inside all day at work (or school), and then encourages them to be passive media consumers at night, placing themselves in front of the television and binge-watching Netflix for hours on end (something I’m very much guilty of myself). PG encourages you to go out and go for a walk, even if it’s not very far or not for very long, if only to replenish your Pokeballs or to try to gain another egg at a Pokestop. And that’s not a bad thing (although I do wonder what it does for people in a wheelchair–do they log distance even though they aren’t “walking,” strictly speaking?).

But, even more importantly, PG has suddenly reversed the “trend” of smartphones and media causing us to be insular and less social (I use scare-quotes because I’m not actually convinced that technology has made us more insular and less social, but it has certainly resulted in a different kind of sociality, and an annoying habit of people to be on their phones during meals and other social times). Yesterday alone, we waved at, smiled at, said hello to, and joked with at least two dozen people we never would have noticed if we weren’t playing. And players are pretty obvious–people staring down at their phones (which is fairly ubiquitous, admittedly) with a very intent expression, and all stopping to “hang out” in very particular areas (by Pokestops, especially if someone has put a lure there, which attracts Pokemon at an increased rate for 30 minutes). We encountered several restaurants who had clearly set up lures on purpose next to their patios (a brilliant business strategy on a hot summer afternoon), as well as other places with Pokeballs drawn on their outdoor chalkboards.

We also sat down in the garden and had conversations with several people we never would have given a second glance to without the game. People with knowledge about the game were sharing it with complete newbies (like us), explaining strategy, talking about how to catch Pokemon, explaining the mechanics of items, and so on. Because the competition in PG is restricted to combat, everyone can collect the same Pokemon in an area–it isn’t a race to see who can get them first, and that means that people congregating in an area are going to be much more inclined to cooperate with one another, to share ideal locations, even to “team up” to search together. This game is a way to encourage people to meet other people in their own neighborhoods, restoring a kind of localized community in a way that we’ve lost with the domination of globalizing technology.

It’s also a way to create camaraderie by creating teams–red (Valor), blue (Mystic), yellow (Instinct)–to compete over Gyms. Teams are factions, but they’re more like sports teams than they are tribes or nations. They matter for control of Gyms, but that’s about it. The fact that I’m Valor and someone else is Mystic isn’t really important; we can still collect the same Pokemon or benefit from each other’s lures. We just can’t take a Gym together. I’d recommend that if you have a regular group who likes to walk together or lives near one another, you should all choose the same team, just so that you can take a Gym if you want, but it isn’t going to “wreck” the game if you aren’t.

What is important is that the team gives you an opening to talk to other players. You identify them as PG people, then you ask, “What team are you?” If you share a team, that’s an immediate connection. If–like us–you are still below level five when someone asks you this question, you ask “What does that mean?” and the conversation about how to play can start, and experienced players become teachers instead of being annoyed with the newbies who “can’t do anything,” because it doesn’t really matter in PG whether or not someone is “good” (except in Gyms, but those are only in select locations). And if you’re on another team, friendly banter can ensue, because, again, it doesn’t really matter.

The reasons that PG is revolutionary thus have nothing to do with Pokemon itself and everything to do with the way that it’s taken an existing franchise and used that community to kickstart the revitalization of local connections and social interactions with strangers that are friendly, rather than hostile. And that is something this world desperately needs right now.

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This week I revisited an old game that I’ve known existed for a while–Every Day the Same Dream, a little Flash game developed as part of the 2009 Experimental Gameplay Project by Paolo Pedercini. Every Day is free online, and definitely worth the brief amount of time it takes to play. Every Day is a game I would consider part of the “serious games” movement, even if not deliberately so. The movement, in both education and game development, focuses on producing games with a point (which is not to say that AAA games don’t have a point, they do, but the whole point of “serious games,” if you will, is the point). One of the most noteworthy “serious games” is Brenda Braithwaite’s Train, in which players realize over the course of the game that they’re doing something horrible.

Every Day is not quite as horrifying as Train, but it nevertheless forces players to confront some pretty heavy stuff about life–their own, perhaps, or someone else’s, or both. The creator of Every Day described it as “a slightly existential riff on the theme of alienation and refusal of labor.” The game’s simple graphics and monochrome color palette immediately situate the player within a grim atmosphere, automatically producing a feeling of stress and discomfort in the vein of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt. Verfremdungseffekt, formulated as a part of Bertholt Brecht’s concept of Epic Theatre, is also known as the “distancing effect,” and is designed to make the audience feel remote or alienated from the protagonist(s) of a play–it’s something that also happens in videogames, particularly when the player-character does something that the player would never do and would never want to do (as opposed to something the player would never do but would fantasize about doing). In Every Day, the player starts out feeling something like the Verfremdungseffekt, but, over the course of the game, comes to empathize (or at least identify with) the unnamed player-character.

The game begins in what is ostensibly a bedroom, with the player-character standing beside a spartan bed, a wardrobe on the far side of the room. The only color comes from a flashing red light on what is presumably an alarm clock—a signifier which indicates a likely hostile relationship between the player-character and the alarm, one which is most likely an immediate source of empathy for the player. The player’s only choices—made using the arrow keys and spacebar—are to turn off the alarm (the red light stops blinking) and to walk to the wardrobe to get dressed.

The game is designed to take the player through the mundanity of every day life—and most players will play through “Day One” following the rules—getting dressed, eating breakfast, and so on. For a player following these social conventions, the game plays out as follows.

From the bedroom, the player-character moves into the kitchen, where he is greeted by his wife with the words “Morning, dear.” He proceeds to the elevator outside and pushes the button to summon and then enter the elevator. There is an “Elevator Lady” inside, who says, “Five more steps and you will be a new person.” Outside the elevator, the player-character proceeds to the parking garage, then drives to work through traffic. He passes a tree with a single orange leaf, then enters the office, where his boss tells him, “You are late.” On the wall of the office is a chart, in red, depicting a downward trend. The player-character walks past two and a half rows of identically-dressed office workers all moving their mice in unison before arriving at an empty chair, labeled “My Cubicle.” If the player clicks on the cubicle, the player-character proceeds to sit down and work. Then the day resets.

The player could continue this pattern, behaving as expected, and nothing about the game would change. The possibility of this endless repetition is designed to evoke a feeling of hopelessness and chronic boredom in players, to force them to consider whether or not they wish to continue to play. However, what is interesting about Every Day the Same Dream is its focus on, as Pedercini explained, a “refusal of labor,” or, put more specifically, the answer to the question, “What happens if we don’t follow the rules?” For example, the player can choose to go to work without clothes on (and is fired by his boss, leading to the day starting over). If the player then speaks to the woman in the elevator, she says, “Four more steps and you will be a new person,” a change which indicates that the game in fact wants us to break the rules.

The other deviations the player may take (in any order) include turning away from the parking garage and following a homeless man who says “I know someplace quiet” to a graveyard; getting out of the car to pet a cow; catching the falling fear; and (most drastic) jumping off the roof of the office building. Once the player has completed all five, the day starts over again—except that now there are no other people in the world. The wife is gone, there is no woman in the elevator, no cars on the road, no boss, no people in cubicles. However, if the player-character goes all the way out to the roof, there is another man standing on its edge, who looks—like everyone who worked in the office—exactly like him. As he approaches, the man jumps, and the game ends.

All of this leads us to question several things, including the meaning or intention behind the game—which is precisely the point. Every Day the Same Dream wants us to ask, like Hamlet,

Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them? (Ham. 3.1.58-61)

In other words, “Is this it?” Every Day the Same Dream puts players in a situation which is likely all-too familiar—a job that is dull at best, hateful at worst; a relationship that appears pleasant enough, but without passion; interactions with the rest of the world that are limited by the walls of cars and cubicles. Such a life is unremarkable and, the game seems to suggest, not worth living, just as the game would have no point at all if the player repeated the same day over and over without straying from socially acceptable behaviors.

Life, the game reveals, becomes interesting when we take left turns and dare to do something different. We need to talk to the homeless man on the street corner, to speak to the woman in the elevator, to pet the cow—to establish a human connection with other living beings, just as the player begins to develop that connection to the player-character as he is guided through these small—and large—acts of rebellion. But even that life, it reminds us, is all too brief, and, therefore, it is well worth our while to do something interesting with it, rather than wasting it with the colorless drudgery of the every day.

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The most recent episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, “Lingerie is Not Armor” (2.3), follows up on its predecessor, “Body Language and the Male Gaze,” with a specific example of how videogames exploit the male gaze in order to—I guess—attract potential consumers in the coveted 15-35 straight, white male demographic.

I am a personal anti-fan of the metal bikini which shows up ad nauseum in fantasy games, particularly in World of Warcraft and often on night elves. But the metal bikini is just one example of idiotic female outfits, including snipers with boob-windows built into their outfits (Metal Gear Solid), booty shorts worn to investigate ancient tombs (Tomb Raider, prior to the 2013 reboot), and really tight bodysuits (Catwoman in Arkham City). And that’s just the first things that popped into my mind.

Sarkeesian uses a commercial featuring a cat-suit clad Joanna Dark, and then shows a mock-commercial which makes fun of this trope by featuring a hyper-masculine cartoon character, asking what he’s going to wear while he saves the world. It’s cute. And not entirely inappropriate, given some of the old commercials I’ve seen, particularly for old Tomb Raider games in the 1990s and early 2000s until Crystal Dynamics rebooted Lara Croft with pants.

Sarkeesian goes on to feature a particularly egregious perpetrator of the metal bikini trope in Soul Caliber (2008), and I have to say, I cannot imagine anyone—except possibly a BDSM mistress who really likes wedgies—actually wearing that outfit, much less in combat, since it would have to literally be superglued on to make those little stringy bits of fabric stay in place while moving. It’s awful. But, you might be tempted to say, that’s from 2008! We totally know better now.

But, clearly, we don’t. (And by “we” I mean the designers catering to that imagined pubescent male demographic that somehow all publishers think is a goldmine.) The next game on the list is from 2014 (Ultra Street Fighter), and features a street fighter in a thong.

And then we go through an actual rapid-fire list of awful outfits from a variety of games and genres over the last twenty years. And that’s just a handful of what must be nearly hundreds of games. (Admittedly, it also includes a clip from The Witcher 2 in which one of the characters is actively mocking another for not having on enough armor for combat—clearly satire rather than intentional titillation.)

And then there’s Bayonetta (2010). I know there are a lot of people who really love that game. I know there are a lot of people who believe that the way her sexuality is used—literally, in the embodiment of her hair, which is both her clothing and a weapon—is empowering. I don’t get it, at all, and neither does Sarkeesian, but I do know that there are some interesting arguments to be made about it, so I’m not going to condemn it outright here. However, Sarkeesian does point out that Bayonetta participates in a kind of misleading cultural practice of equating female power with sexuality—the femme fatale—in which sexuality becomes the key for women to access power. What this also means is that women who don’t exploit their sexuality lose power—or, rather, that women’s sexuality becomes aligned in such cultural artifacts with power to such a degree that the only power women are permitted must be sexual. And that is a problem, not explicitly within the context of the game, but because it presumes that women in power must also be highly sexual beings who used that sexuality to gain power—therefore, colloquially, “she must have slept her way to the top.”

Now neither I nor Sarkeesian is saying that Bayonetta makes the argument that women can only achieve power if they sleep their way into it—what we’re saying is that the pervasiveness of depictions like that in Bayonetta creates certain presumptions in the collective social consciousness that makes that presumption a part of our cultural capital. Women can only reach positions of power if they’re willing to bargain their sexuality for them—either by literally prostituting themselves for it, or by being willing to inhabit sexualized positions for the benefit and pleasure of others (usually men) by wearing sexy outfits or behaving in ways which maximize others’ perceptions of their own masculine virility.

Sarkeesian shows a series of female athletes in a variety of attire to demonstrate that context is the key—there are women in track, for instance, who wear not as much clothing as women in Judo, but that makes sense. She also makes the point that the problem of clothing is that it isn’t the amount of clothing so much as it is the sexualization of clothing that isn’t appropriate in context. She also presents several examples of sexuality that isn’t problematically sexualized—and then some which she believes are (although I’d argue that some of the latter are less problematic than she suggests). The overall point is that it isn’t sexuality that’s the problem—it’s the exploitation of sexuality and “sexiness” that causes issues.

This is not a problem, by the way, that can be laid at the door of videogames. Videogames are as much a symptom as they are a perpetuation of the problem—this happens on tv, in film, in books, in music, etc. It’s a ubiquitous part of modern American culture. But just because it happens everywhere does not mean that we should just shrug and accept it—I’d really prefer to see less of it, thank you very much. And we are—tv shows like How to Get Away with Murder are showcasing powerful women who aren’t exclusively featured for their sexuality (although Viola Davis is pretty hot), nor are their achievements attributed to being the wife/girlfriend/lover of a male in power.

Sadly, though, many videogames continue to demonstrate that they’re still stuck sometime in the 1980s or 1990s by featuring outfits like Quiet’s in Metal Gear Solid V, which is clearly a practical sniper’s outfit. The argument that “she picked it” (which she didn’t, since she’s a digital construct) just doesn’t fly with me—not only is Quiet’s outfit impractical in the extreme, but it’s clearly only there for the pleasure of a presumed-straight male audience. The assertion in the game that “she breathes through her skin” is about as idiotic a justification for overt sexualization that I’ve ever heard (and Sarkeesian says pretty much the same thing). If you’re going to make a person or alien or something that breathes through its skin, great—but don’t use it as a justification for putting exposed breasts in media.

The idiocy of some of the “reasons” for these outfits only compounds the idea that their presence in games is a kind of aesthetic temper-tantrum being thrown by male developers for the benefit of male players who don’t want those nasty feminists ruining their games by putting clothes on the female characters (clothes which, by the way, have nothing to do with the gameplay or content 99.99% of the time).

Just for the sake of argument, let’s say that you’re making a game which takes place entirely on a resort beach. In that case, it would be realistic for all the women to be wearing bathing suits—many of them bikinis. Even then, however, I might suggest that such a game is intentionally choosing a situation in which it is “allowed” to sexualize women (depending, of course, on the game) so that when someone like Sarkeesian points it out, they can wave their hands and say “But it’s normal to wear a bikini to the beach! You’re just being an uppity feminist!”

Here’s the thing. In some cases, there are “legitimate” excuses for why a female character might not be wearing a lot of clothing (and no, “breathing through her skin” is not one of them). She might be at a beach, or she might be a Victorian prostitute, a Restoration-era actress, or on a tropical island in booty shorts and a tank top. Irrespective of the justification, we live in a culture where the objectification of women is a serious social problem, and when games create justifications for perpetuating that, they are not only participating in that culture, they are exacerbating it when they do so in an intentionally exploitative way—when a bikini is a reward (as at the end of the original Metroid) or the outfit is far more revealing than necessary (I’m not listing all the examples of this) or there is no need to include random prostitutes or bikini-clad-women other than to throw in a little bit of cleavage (also not listing all the examples of this).

Does this mean that women in games should all we wearing blocky business suits and button-down shirts or full body armor? Not if that isn’t appropriate attire. If you’re a combat specialist—like, say, the women in Halo Reach or Gears of War 3—then yes, body armor is a good choice. If you’re a spy, however, then it might be appropriate to wear an evening gown and heels on occasion. If you’re Lara Croft in Siberia, you ought to be wearing a parka (thank you, Rise of the Tomb Raider), but when you get to the thermal valley, something like a tanktop and cargo pants is more appropriate.

And yes, there are male characters who are sometimes put into equally stupid outfits—but not nearly as often. In fact, the relative infrequency with which male characters wear ludicrously revealing clothing is so scant as to be barely worth commenting on (although a banana-hammock is also really not appropriate combat-wear, either). But in Western culture, men are not the primary targets of objectification and sexism, so when male characters are featured in stupidly revealing clothing, it doesn’t do the same kind of social harm, and that’s why when we talk about the problems of metal bikinis, we aren’t talking about the guy in the steel thong.